Suggested Readings for the GRE

About the Reading Lists
The following lists were compiled by the faculty of the English Department to help students study for the Advanced Test of the Graduate Record Exam. These lists are more than that however; they are excellent texts that every English major should aspire to read, whether or not graduate school beckons. Ideally, all of us would be able to take a class in these subjects and study them with the guidance of a professor who has made the period or subject a specialty. The reality is that most of us will have studied many of these texts, recognize others by name or title, and need to read the rest.

If you are approaching a period or a subject about which you know little, it is best to first consult an anthology or a literary history for background, then read the texts. There is no substitute, especially for the Advanced Test in Literature, for knowing the standard anthologies well. Anthologies, which often offer only abridged portions of long texts, can never substitute for the original, but their introductions can give readers backgrounds that are a workable, if not perfect, survey of the period.

You may also think of these lists as summer reading; for those times when you are relatively free from other responsibilities and are looking for something great to read. This is a compilation of the best of the best literature has to offer and it would be a worthy goal to have read everything listed here by graduation.

Critical Theory

Henry Abelove, et. al. eds.: The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

Bill Ashcroft, et. al. eds.: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

Catherine Belsey: Critical Practice

Tony Bennett: Formalism and Marxism

Stephen Greenblatt, Giles Gunn: Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies

Terence Hawkes: Structuralism and Semiotics

Angeline Mitchell: Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism From the Harlem Renaissance to the Present

Classical Literature

Classical Literature|TOP|
The following list does not pretend to cover--in any sense of the term--the field of classical literature or to offer any judgments of value whatsoever. It simply presents what, by a wide stretch of the imagination, could possibly be thought of as useful in preparing for the GRE in English, though I doubt its usefulness even for that. (For actual graduate study in English, different sets of classical authors and works would be appropriate to concentration in different periods of English literature.)

For this specific purpose, the translation consulted does not matter very much. In general, the translations of the Penguin Classics are safe (and sometimes much better than that); and in the case of Greek tragedy, the same can be said of the series edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and published by the University of Chicago. Where I have found translations other than these especially useful or attractive, I have noted them below.